Call For Papers

New intermediaries in the hyperconnected society

The 30th EuroCPR conference will take place in Brussels on March 23-24, 2015 and will be dedicated to a set of issues and their consequences for EU policy in several domains, from e-communications regulation to privacy and data protection, intellectual property, industrial policy, the digital agenda, media pluralism, universal access, and many others.

Drastic
changes have occurred over the last decade in the ICT sector. The
blurring of boundaries between previously distinct sectors is
accelerating, and even the traditional four-layer representation of
the ecosystem is being challenged by the emergence of a variety of
platforms and networks, which display various degrees of openness and
patterns of interaction with end users. More specifically, the
emergence of Over-The-Top (OTT) players, the growing importance of
Content Delivery Networks, the “platformization” of the
application layer, and upcoming developments in cloud computing, the
Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine communications suggest that
the ICT ecosystem is quickly expanding and transforming, and will
likely change again in the years to come, with hardly predictable
effects in terms of end users’ experience and policy/regulatory
challenges.

One
very important effect of this evolution is an ongoing process of
“dis-intermediation” and “re-intermediation” of many services
and markets. The emergence of giant aggregators and new platform
operators at various layers of the ecosystem leads to an ongoing
process of transformation, which challenges policymakers in many
areas of law. To name a few: competition policy suffers as market
definition, market power, collection of evidence and the finding of
abusive behavior become much more challenging in this environment
than in other, more traditional domains, and struggles to capture the
new tensions that arise when companies attempt to leverage their
points of control over customer relationships to achieve prominence
in digital value chains; as a consequence, also EU e-communications
regulation, traditionally based on competition law concepts and
focused on the infrastructure layer of the ecosystem, appears in
great need of a thorough review; privacy and data protection
legislation struggle with the emergence of cloud computing and big
data, which create new trade-offs between security, customization and
privacy; copyright law divides scholars, with some favouring stronger
enforcement and others invoking the end of authors’ commercial
rights. Increasingly, the ongoing transformation and expansion of the
ecosystem conquer new territories, challenging also social policy,
education, financial services and many other fields: this leads to
further pressure on the “new intermediaries” in terms of
behaviour vis-à-vis unaffiliated service providers and end users.

As
the evolution of the ecosystem is faster and more international than
the regulatory process, the effectiveness of many is challenged. The
same can be said for enforcement. This timing problem further
empowers new platform operators and aggregators (the “new
intermediaries”), to the extent that they are also increasingly
called to implement and enforce public policy through private means,
as is increasingly the case for privacy and the right to be
forgotten, cyber-security and critical information infrastructure
protection, net neutrality, search neutrality, etc. To what extent
this tendency will be confirmed in the future, and to what extent
should the new intermediaries be called to take responsibility for
rule enforcement, is matter for discussion.

The
30th EuroCPR conference will take place in Brussels on March 23-24, 2015
and will be dedicated to this set of issues, and their consequences
for EU policy in several domains, from e-communications regulation to
privacy and data protection, intellectual property, industrial
policy, the digital agenda, media pluralism, universal access, and
many others.

We
invite papers on the following subjects:

Societal
impacts of the emerging ICT ecosystem.
Themes in this track might include the impact of new technologies
and platforms on universal access to information, the potential
divide created by the lack of digital literacy, the future of
welfare policies such as the provision of healthcare, the future of
the job market in light of emerging developments.

Direct access
or new forms of intermediation?
What are the respective business cases of direct access and forms of
intermediations? What are the relevant business models? What changes
are they triggering on incumbent players?

The role of
neutrality, interoperability and openness at all layers of the ICT
ecosystem.
To what extent neutrality, interoperability and openness are always
in the interest of the end user? Do they have an impact on key goals
such as static and dynamic competition, data protection,
intermediary liability? And, would the current re-intermediation
lead to the end of the Internet’s end-to-end architecture?

Model(s) of
competition/issue of dominance:
The changing nature of competition is evolving with the growing role
of these OTT players, with the growing role of Internet
intermediaries. How to assess dominance in multisided markets?

Regulation of
OTTs and other intermediaries:
is there a need extending legacy regulation to OTT players or
introducing new more comprehensive regulation? Other regulatory
issues that fall in this track include privacy protection,
intellectual property rights, Net neutrality.

The need to
revisit existing policies.
In some policy domains the need to reach a level playing field
between competing intermediaries is often evoked. Moreover, often
policies are designed to fit a specific territorial organization
(country, region). The new players are not only acting outside the
former legacy silos but also located outside the territory in which
a policy is implemented (e.g quotas and funding obligations). Are
these policies still valid, their goals still legitimate in a
digital environment. Or are new policies to be designed ad
hoc?
Key EU legislation affected by these developments includes the
e-communications framework, the network and information security
directive, the data protection regulation, the e-commerce directive
and others.

In line with the
EuroCPR philosophy, we welcome papers that reflect on the
policy/business and policy/legal dimensions of the topics listed
above as well as on their societal and economic implications. We
welcome papers that compare policy trends in Europe and other regions
of the world, and particularly encourage the submission of empirical
work. Please note that also papers that are relevant to the overall
conference theme, but not directly related to the suggested themes
and topics, will be considered for participation in the conference.
All papers will be assessed by a panel of independent reviewers.

A selection of EuroCPR
papers will be published in journals such as

Communications
& Strategies;

Telecommunications
Policy;
and

Info,
the journal
of policy, regulation and strategy for telecommunications,
information and media.

Practical
Information:

Important
dates

Call
for papers: 20 September 2014

Deadline
for abstract submission: 31 October 2014

Notification
of selected abstracts: 30 November 2014

Deadline
for submitting final papers: 1 March 2015

EuroCPR2015
Conference: 23-24 March 2015

Abstracts

Abstracts
should be no longer than 700 words
and should address the research question, outline the main results,
theory, methods and data (as appropriate) and highlight the policy
relevance.

If
you do not have an account with easychair you must set one up. If you
have used easychair as an author or reviewer for a previous
conference, you can reuse your existing password and account. Please
ensure that your abstract is anonymised. You will be invited to enter
your personal invitation into a separate section.

EuroCPR
is organised annually with the ambition to contribute constructively
and critically to European Information Society Policy developments.
The conference addresses the use of ICT throughout society and
economy as well as the evolution of the ICT and media sectors.
EuroCPR uniquely brings together academia, policy makers, and
industry representatives in order to facilitate systematic
interaction and critical analysis of both the highest academic
excellence and the maximum policy and industrial relevance. The
conference takes place most often in a single room, with sessions
consisting of two presentations with discussants, and a general
debate. The
format of the conference is deliberately kept small - with a maximum
of 80 participants - favouring quality over quantity and encouraging
a high level of interaction. EuroCPR invites abstracts for
theoretically and empirically grounded papers that reflect critically
on the Digital Agenda as such and on factors contributing to progress
towards EU public policy goals so far.

This Email address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it